Saturday, March 20, 2010

Profiling

"A blond, blue-eyed, small framed, middle-aged female. It couldn't get any further from your typical 'terrorist' profile."

So opines a sly Muslim apologist, Al-Awlaqi, exploiting the blonde and blue-eyed fact of the recently apprehended American convert to Islam, "Jihad Jane", who had gone to Ireland as part of a cell of Muslims intent on assassinating one of the Danish cartoonists who had "insulted" Mohammed.

That's why law enforcement officials should be targeting the ideology and the belief-system. But they aren't. And they won't.

However:

1. The percentage of Muslims who don't look ethnic compared with those who do remains astronomically low (and if we limit it to Awlaqi's rhetorical "blonde and blue-eyed", it goes down even further). Only when non-ethnic-appearing Muslims approach 50% of the total Muslim population would it become rational to reject physiognomic profiling as one element among many in our overall profiling methodology.

2. In previous editorial remarks over the years, Spencer has noted, appositely, that the phrase "war on terror" is faulty because, as he wrote in this article --

Terror is a tactic, not an opponent. To wage a “war on terror” is like waging a “war on bombs”: it focuses on a tool of the enemy rather than the enemy himself.

But here in the former article mentioned above, Spencer seems to be doing precisely what he criticized official policy for doing in that previous article: Spencer recommends that we "target the ideology and the belief system" in order to keep our planes and other public spaces safe. The only problem is, ideologies and belief systems don't explode and mass-murder people on an airplane: Muslims do.

There are two ways to identify a Muslim:

1) through background checks that themselves depend upon accurate records and that can successfully circumvent attempts at camouflage or deceit by the Muslim in question if that Muslim in question has something to hide

2) through visual, physical indicators -- which ideally should include everything relevant, thus not excluding physiognomic ethnicity as well as vocal accents, clothing and other paraphernalia.

When protecting our airplanes, airports, and other public spaces, the task becomes more complex than people think: multitudes of people swarm together, going in different directions, doing different things. Given the nature of the danger we face, we don't have the luxury of time to avoid racial profiling in such a situation. Of course, given the prevalence of PC MC and its template set in stone of creating an artificial category of "radical extremist Islamists" in order to protect the vast majority of supposed "moderate Muslims", the first identification technique described above would be currently forced to delimit itself to those Muslims whom we already know are terrorism-inclined (and even that delimitation has proven to be lethally faulty, as with the Christmas Day bomber and the Fort Hood shooter).

As Spencer said in the second above-referenced article:

A refusal to identify the enemy is extremely dangerous, as it leaves those who refuse vulnerable to being blindsided by attacks coming from quarters they did not think could possibly be threatening...

Indeed. And that should also apply to profiling to protect our public spaces. What threatens our lives is not merely a book, an ideology, or a belief system: Before the deadly instructions contained in those inert entities can harm us, they need to be activated and put into practice by actual human beings who follow them. And we need to prevent those human agents from doing so. We cannot do this optimally without integrating racial and Muslim profiling into our methodology.